School has Started!

As of yesterday, another semester of school has started for me. There is no doubt that my schedule will now be filled with due dates for papers and exams to study for. I will probably be worried about my grant money coming in on time and stressed out over the bureaucracy of college. And of course, I will no doubt be living like a zombie as I try to fit more hours into the day (I already am exhausted!).

But with school comes the memory of how I first began thinking about genealogy…

My seventh grade teacher gets the award for sparking my interest in genealogy. As we were learning about World War II, the class was given a project to interview a veteran of World War II. He told us hat if there was no one in our families that we could interview, then we would have to go out into nursing homes and retirement homes to find one.

While I had at first thought my grandfather was too young to have been in World War II, after talking to my dad, I discovered that my grandfather was perfect for the assignment.

I nervously got on the phone and called my grandpa in Tennessee, whom I never really talked to often. We had always exchanged letters and pictures, but we had never really talked on the phone (I am still not sure why) His deep, scratchy voice and southern accent was certainly something I had to get used to and it took me a while before I was able to understand him.

While I don’t remember exactly what I asked him or the stories that he told me, I do remember feeling more connected to history than I had ever felt before. After I had completed my assignment, we continued to talk about where he lived. He told me old ghost stories from the area and told me that I would have to come visit him. He told me about how the people in the area still made moonshine and had small family farms (Which was certainly a shock for me. As he would say “You glitz and glamour types wouldn’t understand none”).

After that, I began to wonder what other things in history my family had contributed too. I thought of all the prestigious things such as being the descendant of the Queen of England, being related to a president, or proudly serving in the Revolutionary War.

Soon after, I became bit by the genealogy bug…and the rest is history.